Performance

The ZTE Blade S6 sports the Qualcomm MSM8939 Snapdragon 615 chipset equipped with four Cortex-A53 cores, clocked at 1.7 GHz and another four at 1.0 GHz. It is backed up by 2GB of RAM and comes with 16 GB of onboard storage, which is extendible through a microSD card. The accompanying GPU is the modest Adreno 405.

This particular hardware setup is quite good, especially for a sub $300 phone. It does not seems to be particularly popular, with only a few other adopters, like the Oppo R5, HTC Desire 820 and soon the Lenovo Vibe X2 Pro. It does, however offer an impressive price to performance ration and brings current technologies and standards in a budget package.

The Snapdragon 615 offers a quite capable octa-core CPU setup which might not be up to par with the advanced features of the recent 800 series Qualcomm chips, but is nonetheless, the top offering from the 600 series. It has 64-bit support, which is a must, given Android's recent move towards the generally better-performing architecture, so it is pretty much an investment in the future.

The Adreno 405 will also happily handle most current graphics-intense game you can throw at it and comes fully equipped to handle LTE ant Cat. 4 speeds of up to 150 Mbps. Few budget-friendly devices can boast such an impressive package, but let's look at benchmark scores and let the numbers speak about the internals of the Blade S6.

First up, we have the raw CPU performance test with GeekBench 3, so things should be pretty straight-forward in this department. Unsurprisingly, the Xiaomi Mi 4, the Samsung Galaxy S5 and the Huawei Honor 5 steal the show with their Snapdragon 801 and HiSilicon Kirin 920, respectively. Interestingly enough, the HTC Desire 820 outperforms the Blade significantly, despite having much the same hardware and so does the Oppo R5. This might be due to some optimization issues with Android Lollipop, but overall, it seems ZTE could have done a better job optimizing the otherwise capable hardware.

This however does not meant that the Blade S6 is not doing well, especially in its own price gap, where the Sony Xperia C3 and Motorola Moto G (2014) are lacking behind in number-crunching capabilities.

GeekBench 3

Higher is better

Xiaomi Mi 43175

Huawei Honor 63135

Samsung Galaxy S5 (5.0)3120

Samsung Galaxy S5 (4.4.2)3011

Oppo R52806

HTC Desire 8202586

HTC Desire 6162125

ZTE Blade S62086

Samsung Galaxy A51460

Lenovo S90 Sisley1377

Sony Xperia C3 Dual1181

Motorola Moto G (2014)1171

Antutu 5, however is a whole different story. In it the Blade S6 shows a significantly higher score and takes its rightful place among the Oppo R5 and HTC Desire 820.

Keeping this in mind, the previous underwhelming GeekBench results might be an app-specific issue as all other benchmarks do the Snapdragon 615 justice.

AnTuTu 5

Higher is better

Samsung Galaxy S5 (5.0)45348

Samsung Galaxy S5 (4.4.2)43164

Oppo R531417

ZTE Blade S627198

HTC Desire 82027070

Samsung Galaxy A521581

Lenovo S90 Sisley19690

Sony Xperia C3 Dual18466

Motorola Moto G (2014)18245

Advancing further to the slightly broader Basemark OS II test, we see much the same. The overall score places the ZTE Blade S6 around the middle of the table with only slight deviations from its direct competitors. Interestingly enough, its single-core performance is quite impressive, even surpassing the Oppo R5.

Basemark OS II

Higher is better

Xiaomi Mi 41324

Samsung Galaxy S5 (5.0)1147

Samsung Galaxy S5 (4.4.2)1082

Oppo R5772

ZTE Blade S6741

HTC Desire 820725

Samsung Galaxy A5555

Motorola Moto G (2014)526

Lenovo S90 Sisley513

Sony Xperia C3 Dual466

HTC Desire 616378

The Blade S6 did get rather hot during testing and a lot of the performance drops might be due to throttling, which might explain the slightly lower-than-expected scores.

Single core performance on the other hand king of disproves this hypothesis, as the phone did a lot better, so the only culprit seems to be Android 5.0. After all, it is only natural that the new ART virtual machine and the enormous amount of changes in APIs and behavior result in some difference in benchmarking applications. This might be the reason behind some of the odd scores.

Basemark OS II (single-core)

Higher is better

Xiaomi Mi 42573

Samsung Galaxy S5 (5.0)2510

Samsung Galaxy S5 (4.4.2)2415

HTC Desire 8201812

ZTE Blade S61721

Oppo R51657

HTC Desire 6161533

Samsung Galaxy A51217

Sony Xperia C3 Dual1203

Lenovo S90 Sisley1187

Motorola Moto G (2014)1123

Basemark OS II (multi-core)

Higher is better

HTC Desire 61612986

Samsung Galaxy S5 (4.4.2)10063

Oppo R510000

Samsung Galaxy S5 (5.0)9646

Xiaomi Mi 49508

HTC Desire 8208453

ZTE Blade S66064

Sony Xperia C3 Dual5234

Motorola Moto G (2014)5001

Samsung Galaxy A54880

Lenovo S90 Sisley4208

As already mentioned, the ZTE Blade S6 comes equipped with an Adreno 405 GPU which delivers decent performance at a budget price. Looking at the graphics tests, everything looks nice and straightforward. The device puts out almost identical frame rates to the Desire 820 and Oppo R5, which share its GPU, just as expected. Onscreen performance on the Oppo is around half of the other two, which is also absolutely in line with the fact that it has a Full HD screen, whereas the others offer only HD resolutions.

Unsurprisingly, the Galaxy S5 and Xiaomi Mi4 dwarf the Blade with their Adreno 330 GPU, but interestingly enough, looking at other offers from the sub $300 range it seems that the ZTE easily surpasses the competition in both onscreen and offscreen performance. All and all, the Adreno 405 is a rare find on a sub-$300 device, which deserves an honorable mention.

GFX 2.7 T-Rex (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

Samsung Galaxy S5 (4.4.2)27.8

Xiaomi Mi 427.6

Samsung Galaxy S5 (5.0)27

Oppo R515.1

ZTE Blade S615

HTC Desire 82015

HTC Desire 6168.7

Motorola Moto G (2014)5.8

Sony Xperia C3 Dual5.8

Lenovo S90 Sisley5.4

Samsung Galaxy A55.3

GFX 2.7 T-Rex (onscreen)

Higher is better

Xiaomi Mi 428.2

Samsung Galaxy S5 (4.4.2)28.1

Samsung Galaxy S5 (5.0)28

HTC Desire 82026

ZTE Blade S624

Oppo R514.8

HTC Desire 61613.4

Sony Xperia C3 Dual11

Motorola Moto G (2014)10.8

Samsung Galaxy A59.6

Lenovo S90 Sisley9.3

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

Samsung Galaxy S5 (5.0)12

Samsung Galaxy S5 (4.4.2)11.8

Xiaomi Mi 411.6

ZTE Blade S65.8

Oppo R55.8

HTC Desire 8205.7

Lenovo S90 Sisley1.8

Samsung Galaxy A51.8

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

HTC Desire 82012

Samsung Galaxy S5 (5.0)12

Samsung Galaxy S5 (4.4.2)11.7

Xiaomi Mi 411.3

ZTE Blade S611

Oppo R55.8

Motorola Moto G (2014)4.1

Sony Xperia C3 Dual4

Lenovo S90 Sisley3.9

Samsung Galaxy A53.9

The ZTE Blade S6 punches well above its league in terms of browser performance. It pretty much towers above the competition, with the notable exception of the Oppo R5. It however has Chrome as its default browser, which might just give it the extra edge. The Blade S6 also has Google's browser preloaded, but uses the Android one by default, so testing was done using it.

Kraken 1.1

Lower is better

Samsung Galaxy S5 (5.0)5968

Samsung Galaxy S5 (4.4.2)6043

Xiaomi Mi 46137

Oppo R511656

ZTE Blade S612865

Samsung Galaxy A513083

HTC Desire 82013568

Lenovo S90 Sisley14488

Sony Xperia C3 Dual15737

Motorola Moto G (2014)15988

HTC Desire 61616953

BrowserMark 2.1

Higher is better

Samsung Galaxy S5 (5.0)2066

Samsung Galaxy S5 (4.4.2)1398

Oppo R51319

ZTE Blade S61271

Samsung Galaxy A51171

Motorola Moto G (2014)1085

Lenovo S90 Sisley1076

HTC Desire 820991

Xiaomi Mi 4744

HTC Desire 616683

Performance-wise the ZTE Blade S6 is definitely a neck above its competition. It packs quite the punch for a $250 phone and is almost without competition as far as price to performance is concerned. While the device has its shortcomings, performance is definitely not one of them.

Equipped with a 64-bit octa-core Snapdragon 615 CPU and 2GB of RAM, it is more than safe for any android update in the foreseeable future. And if having Lollipop out-of-the box is any representation of ZTE's Future support plans, then it should be able to stay relevant on the market for quite some time.